Reading backwards
I was walking towards Botterell Hall today (there’s a colloquium by Gordon Logan at 3:30 in B139 about “Executive Processes with Attention and Memory”) and I glanced at a window, seeing a street sign that said “Traube.” And I was like, “Traube?” I didn’t know we had German street names here. And then I realized that I was reading the sign in a mirror and it actually said Stuart St. (which is almost “traube” backwards). That’s the danger of top-down processing when combined with bilingualism.
There are a few really neat articles at Developing Intelligence about cortical growth and the computational models that explain pruning strategy. I suggest you check them out.